Archive for the ‘india’ tag
Mumbai blasts: Lets join hands to fight terror
This has not been a particularly happy week. Mumbai, the financial capital of India was attacked on Wednesday 26th Nov, with terrorists simultaneously attacking 10 prominent locations in the city. The attack seems to be very well planned with places like Taj Mahal Palace, Oberoi Trident and Nariman Point under seige.
A previously unknown organization called Deccan Mujahideen claimed responsibility of these attacks in which over 150 people lost their lives. It is suggested that this group is linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba and Al Qaida.
Yesterday, we started putting together some of the prominent news on a timeline to make sense out of it. As we did it, we became curious to also find out about the other terrorist attacks that have shaken various parts of India recently and also started adding those on to the timeline. The resulting timeline is embedded below and there are a lot of interesting observations that can be made here:
1) Terror is not a recent phenomenon to India. The first significant act of external terror happened as early as 1989, almost 20 years from today.
2) Between 1990 and 2001, there have been regular incidents of terror, the 1993 bomb blasts in Mumbai being the most significant of those.
3) Post 2001, the frequency of terror activities has increased significantly. This is the period after Al Qaeda attacked the twin towers on 9/11 and the frequency can be easily gauged from the number of items that show up on the screen.
4) Fast forward to 2008 and this one year has the highest number of terrorist attacks that have ever happened in India in a single year. Notably, these attacks are not limited to a particular region but spread all over India.
This analysis does bring out an interesting and scary pattern, that the terrorist activites are becoming more frequent, that the activities are getting spread out and that the activities are getting more organized while being distributed.
It is high time we realize the gravity of the situation and make a concerted effort to fight terror. This is not something that a government can do by itself – all of us need to get involved to fight terror and bring peace and harmony back to the earth.
Lets join hands, lets get together to come up with ideas and fight this terror.
